The kids are not alright
Expanding inequality and divestment from public goods has disproportionately hurt the young
You know the feeling because you’ve probably felt it. The warm sensation that rises from within but starts from without. Surrounded by people you love, not just one connection away, but multiple degrees separating you from them. Yet, the attention, the care, the joy, radiates. Embracing it is the easy part.
Community love is an affection unlike what is often described in films and YouTube videos. It’s a warmth that isn’t quite as passionate as romance, and not always as intimate as one-on-one friendship. It’s more like a bond multiplied many times over. It’s a security blanket of sociality as well as space for lingering opportunity in the form of play, adventure, and exploration. But it’s feeling, oddly, has often gone unnoticed, with the public preferring to focus on broader policies without noticing the very thing that those prescriptions touch.
In recent years, however, that may be changing.
In the last two decades, there’s been serious coverage of the crumbling and cratering nature of our social institutions, with particular attention paid to localities. The divestment from public resources and emphasis on individual success has had far-reaching consequences for the public. Church attendance is down and Veteran halls are emptying out. People are being kicked out of their homes without outrage from neighbors. The Public pools have been drained, giving way to private ones. We bowl alone.
Many scholars and journalists have come around to the notion that, beginning in the late 60s, a libertarian revolution started sweeping across parts of the Western world. Headed by figures like Reagan, Thatcher, and Friedman, some countries decided to invest culturally and politically in the solo ethic. The results are now vivid in the forms of individual wealth, privatized play, smaller social circles and shrunken family networks. This was the prioritization that, sometimes incidentally and often intentionally, cut off broad swaths of people from both the financial necessities and joyful simplicities of life.
The results, to be sure, have not been even. Almost half a century later, the racial wealth gap between whites and Blacks has expanded, minimum wages have stagnated and often fallen, and people are more disconnected and, consequently, depressed. As gaps in education, wealth, income, and wellbeing continue to yawn, there is less opportunity for the poor, for the young, for the Black and Latino, which is only truer for those who hold all three identities.
Such Inequality has shaped modern neighborhood formations, as specific blocks cut more starkly across lines of class than ever before. It’s as if, during the late 1970s, a drawbridge was pulled up, preventing entry into an ever-shrinking castle, leaving the rest sinking in an ever-deepening moat. As is usually the case in history, those hurt most are the most innocent. To be blunt, the kids are not alright.
As such, the locus of attention, the node in which I’d like to emphasize, is at the neighborhood level, where communities are often either on a fast track to growth or decline. In 2008, Bill Bishop started tangentially noting this phenomenon when he wrote The Big Sort. While emphasizing political polarization, he was broadly discussing the idea that that people were more likely to live around those who are more like them, according to ideology, religious affiliation, political identity, education level and more. But what was true of that text when it was written has only become truer now: we divide ourselves not just by our social immateriality but by our material status. It’s those chasms that are growing in tandem together. It’s that gap, occurring first in our neighborhoods, that’s disproportionately our hurting kids.
Reach Them Early
The problems associated with poverty are easily understood — more stress, less sleep, poorer food quality, more instability, greater exposure to violence. The outcomes are straightforward. But interestingly, fleeing impoverished spaces for wealthier neighborhoods nets better results when they occur earlier children’s lives. Significantly better. A 2016 paper found that children who moved to better-resourced neighborhoods before the age of 13 were more likely to earn $2500 more through their 20s than their peers who moved after that age. A similar pattern was found with teachers.
Good teachers are most always good, but they are better for younger students. A study using tax records to analyze the life trajectory of millions of students from the third to eighth grades found that those who had better teachers (measured by student test score performance) were more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, and reside in better neighborhoods. It’s not exactly known why, but the results of this research is moving: putting kids in a more stable, resource-flushed environment at an earlier age has a better net effect on their life.
One of the authors of these two studies, Raj Chetty, is uncovering a similar pattern as other social scientists: that social supports in the form of family stability, residential integration, school quality, and community cohesion — all undergirded by middle-upper class wealth — greatly weighs on children’s outcomes. Without these ingredients, communities falter and children are much more likely to suffer, facing seemingly insurmountable barriers.
This is because kids, maybe even more so than adults, are vulnerable to their environments. Such sentiment is captured by scholar Robert Putnam when he quotes the National Academy of Sciences in his book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.
“‘Virtually every aspect of early human development, from the brain’s evolving circuitry to the child’s capacity for empathy, is affected by the environments and experiences that are encountered in a cumulative fashion, beginning in the prenatal period and extending throughout the early childhood years.’”
This is why Alison Gopnik, author of The Gardener and the Carpenter, stresses the need for creating an environment that encourages play, mental stimulation, and safety. A positive, pro-social environment for a child helps foster a rosier, pro-social adult.
“The good gardener (i.e., parent) works to create fertile soil that can sustain a whole ecosystem of different plants with different strengths and beauties — and with different weaknesses and difficulties, too,” she writes.
The Challenge Ahead
Half a century ago, manufacturing plants were the container of the multiplier effect — doubling the jobs that existed around them — and thus, helped spur higher wages and benefits and broad economic stability not just for the manufacturers themselves, but also for those who worked nearby. Today, as is explained in The New Geography of Jobs, that work exists for fewer people on the coasts and in the form of tech jobs.
The loss of millions of middle-class jobs often conjures images of white working-class workers. What gets less attention, however, is that the loss of those jobs has devastated kids in areas with businesses that don’t maintain the new tech multiplier effect. Those losses and the lack of government stability, has created a toxic cycle for future generations that does not seem to be abating. Poverty increases, the most talented continue to leave, divorces rates increase, family instability spirals, incarceration rates rise, and the prospects for a better future or a stable present die.
This is a manifestation of acute inequality. It’s often cited that wealth gaps have grown precipitously with the bottom half taking home very little while the top percent takes the rest of the production gains. What some miss in this conversation is how this phenomenon socially and psychologically manifests itself in our neighborhoods.
Low-income and poor kids, writes Putnam in Our Kids, have no trust, no hope, and no confidence that anything positive will occur in their lives because little positive has happened thus far. They have little conceptualization of a future where stability, openness, and kindness exist because such qualities have seldom been exposed to them. The children seem to be saying, no trust, no hope, and no confidence has been fostered, so how could it manifest later on?
The differences in experiences have become apparent as they appear in “scissors gaps” that have cropped up across the country. These gaps, growing wider between richer and poorer families, can be seen in everything from divorce rates to parental investment to participation in after-school activities. But the conclusion is not that simply a lack of money itself is driving problems in peoples’ everyday lives. That’s because decades ago, financial stability could often be achieved even after starting with little money. Rather, the issue is that wealthier individuals are much less likely to reside in community with less wealthy and poor people. That is, the lack of a broad web connecting more and less materially well-off people has created vast differences in the social experiences of kids. The fact that there is little care gestured toward poorer people proven by firmer neighborhood boundaries of class segregation, in addition to the lack of distribution of public goods and wealth, has created social instability in the form of lower emotional support, fewer engaging activities and clubs, and a dearth of much-needed social networks for poorer kids.
In other words, more affluent localities today are more likely to maintain communal outlets for engagement, socialization, and competition. By contrast, poorer communities are more likely to be deprived of them.
Is There Hope?
Right now, there really isn’t a lot of room for hope. A broad swath of policies needs to be changed in order to better redirect the livelihood of millions. While this story starts at the communal level, it always returns to broader policies. Neighborhoods can’t remain intact if they aren’t supported by bigger, more generous arms.
Zoning policies need to change and more houses needs to be built in more prosperous areas so wealthier communities become more inclusive of poorer individuals; minimum wage laws need to increase to keep up with inflation to give poorer people a better shot at stability; labor laws need to be bolstered to allow for more worker bargaining for more dignity and freedoms in the workplace; universal health care policies must ensure that people don’t fall into debt if they are sick.
There are some trends angling toward a more positive direction. The Biden Administration expanded the Child Tax Credit, thus providing more stability for parents and their children. Democrats are trying to pass a $3 trillion infrastructure bill through reconciliation that would allow for universal pre-K, expanded Medicare, enable better child and elder care, sick leave, and free community college. And young people, who are disproportionately in favor of increasing spending on public goods, are slowly gaining political power to assert their agenda.
Sadly, though, our current politics and economics don’t just impact our current body politic. They influence that of the future. People will be negatively impacted decades from now by the policies that both were and — importantly — were not, implemented during this time. It’s their lives, in the aggregate, that are on the line. The longer Congress waits, or is blocked, from taking action, the worse our neighborhoods, and social outcomes, will be.
